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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Why is music more interesting than any other amalgamation of noises?
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Makepiece
Shipmate
# 10454
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Posted
I was sat on the bus the other night on the way home from work and, as it was a Friday evening, was too tired to do anything other than to listen to the sound of the bus. The humming of the engine was fairly constant and regular, the brakes occasionally screeched and many other sounds such as mobile phones and people speaking sporadically intervened. These sounds had pitch- the faster the bus goes the higher the pitch of the engine. As the vehicle slows the pitch reduces. There is also a regular rhythm, albeit no meter. Nonetheless these noises were utterly monotonous to listen to. What is is that makes good music infinitely more stimulating, aesthetically pleasing and (potentially) spiritually fulfilling? Obviously there is melody and harmony in music which you do not have on a bus, but what are they and why do they make music interesting? Are they even indispensable to the musical experience? Any thoughts?
[ 07. December 2014, 21:17: Message edited by: Makepiece ]
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
My mind went instantly to the work of Harry Partch and his Cloud-Chamber bowls (see also here).
I think I might actually prefer listening to the bus, but I suppose the difference is in intent.
When you know someone's written something, however inaccessible it is, you want to try and understand something of what the composer was trying to say.
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
There is Drone metal, which has very little harmony or melody. Or rhythm. But is still music, still something I can listen to. Not everyones cup of tea.
I think it is about art - you hear something of the artists feelings and meaning through the music. Rather like painted art, which is art (IMO) if it can communicate something of the artists intentions. That applies even if it appears technically straightforward.
Music engages the emotions. If it doesn't - and some of the manufactured pap around doesn't - it is sound, not music. A personal view, but I would rather listen to a bus noises than 1D.
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Because the human brain is wired to find, recognize, analyze, and appreciate PATTERN. It's why we see faces in the embers, or in photographs of Mars. We are the pattern-seekers.
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
A long time ago I was working in an old industrial complex which was being renovated as trendy high tech offices.
I was programming one day and the sounds of the workmen were pretty loud; they were tearing a metal roof apart on another wing of the building prior to repairing it.
A while later I stopped intently programming and noticed that the sounds had changed in the interim. After a moment I realized the roof repair had stopped and I was listening to my neighbor playing a c.d. of Philip Glass music. I had missed the transition completely.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Because the human brain is wired to find, recognize, analyze, and appreciate PATTERN. It's why we see faces in the embers, or in photographs of Mars. We are the pattern-seekers.
Yes.
Fundamentally, music is organised sound. And we appreciate the sense of organisation.
There are mathematical relationships in music that tend not to be present in other sounds.
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
I think it is organised, but in human terms, not necessarily mathematical ones. That is, it doesn't have to fit our normal ideas of melody and rhythm to be identified as music. I think we see patterns because it is generated by a person, to an extent.
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
A long time ago I was working in an old industrial complex which was being renovated as trendy high tech offices.
I was programming one day and the sounds of the workmen were pretty loud; they were tearing a metal roof apart on another wing of the building prior to repairing it.
A while later I stopped intently programming and noticed that the sounds had changed in the interim. After a moment I realized the roof repair had stopped and I was listening to my neighbor playing a c.d. of Philip Glass music. I had missed the transition completely.
![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif) I know people who'd prefer the roof repairs. Personally, I can take Glass in small doses.
Although I think there's a lot in what mousethief says, I also think there's a degree to which music and culture interact. There are some things that one culture will recognise as music, that another culture won't. Our own traditional ideas of things like harmony and cadence would sound very alien to other cultures. There are chords that to us sound pleasantly harmonious, that would have made people in the 16th century wince. One of the things that makes Wagner's Tristan und Isolde awesome to some and torture to others is that (I'm told) there's only one perfect cadence in the whole work, and it isn't even at the end.
As for the bus noises, we might find there's a thin line between monotonous and trance-like. Philip Glass may somoetimes sound like someone fixing a roof, but he also composed the mesmeric and beautiful Koyaanisqatsi.
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Makepiece
Shipmate
# 10454
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Because the human brain is wired to find, recognize, analyze, and appreciate PATTERN. It's why we see faces in the embers, or in photographs of Mars. We are the pattern-seekers.
Yes.
Fundamentally, music is organised sound. And we appreciate the sense of organisation.
There are mathematical relationships in music that tend not to be present in other sounds.
These are good answers but also incomplete (admittedly there may be no complete answer). Not all organised, patterned sounds can be defined as music. The clicking noise of the indicator on my car is organised sound and is designed to alert me to the fact that it is on. The difference, it is true, is that the indicator is not designed to be aesthetically pleasing but that doesn't explain
how music is rendered such. Indicators in cars are extremely organised. To some extent a piece of music can only be interesting if it deviates from organisation and pattern. Of course in order to 'deviate' the composer must have been able to establish a 'pattern' that can be deviated from. Pattern stimulates our attention but it does not of itself produce affect. What is it in the laying down of pattern and deviation that does produce affect?
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mark_in_manchester
not waving, but...
# 15978
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Posted
When I had a 'real job' I used to know something about this.
quote:
There are mathematical relationships in music that tend not to be present in other sounds.
There are papers (sorry, this is a long time ago and a quick Google has not been my friend) which compare different musical genre using a metric called the 'probability density function'. This can be formulated to express the degree of self-similarity in a signal. Very self-similar signals in audio sound to most people rather tedious, and (literally, or rather mathematically) over-predictable. Very un-self-similar signals approach, in the limit, the maths and sound of random noise.
All sorts of musics fall into a middle-state (sometimes called a 1/f distribution) which seems to imply a 'blend of ordered and random characteristics common to all sensorial input judged as aesthetic', as I remember from a quote I used in lectures. But composer-input is very valuable too, as has been shown by attempts at machine-composition using 1/f-based algorithms, which have not generally been auditioned as 'successful'.
OK, that would be much better had I written it 10 years ago, appropriately referenced. But, praise God, that is not my life any more!
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
not to mention rhythm
there are very few arrhythmic forms of music, (though I know of one set of musical pieces composed to sound like music even though it is deliberately arrhythmic). Natural sounds are interesting and pleasant, but fade to background very quickly unless there is a rhythm.
and the next step up from rhythm is beat (n+1 patterns) arising from chords
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Makepiece:
What is it in the laying down of pattern and deviation that does produce affect?
You're arguably asking the question backwards. It's not the case that there was some preexisting thing called "music" and then we came along and said "hey, that's really NICE, what a coincidence". No, we made particular sounds because they affected us. Music is shaped by what people find appealing.
The question isn't what it is in music that produces affect in us. The question is what is it in us that finds a combination of pattern and deviation appealing.
It's just the way our brains are wired. As mousethief said, we are wired to notice patterns. We are also wired to notice change and variation - our brains work by noticing changes in our environment and filtering out unchanging stuff on the grounds that it probably isn't important.
[ 08. December 2014, 20:19: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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cattyish
Wuss in Boots
# 7829
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Posted
I find it interesting that music seems to have beauty and meaning without reference to any specific outside thing. Art in general tends to have a meaning external to itself (with lots of exceptions of course) but a symphony or even a strum on a guitar can be a fascinating and uplifting thing without telling us about ourselves or the world around us. Maybe sound is something we've always depended on as part of our emotional landscape, like smells and tastes.
Cattyish, interested though not particularly knowledgeable.
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
not to mention rhythm
there are very few arrhythmic forms of music, (though I know of one set of musical pieces composed to sound like music even though it is deliberately arrhythmic). Natural sounds are interesting and pleasant, but fade to background very quickly unless there is a rhythm.
and the next step up from rhythm is beat (n+1 patterns) arising from chords
Most drone is arrythmical. Check out some Sunn O. It works because it is constantly changing the feel.
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Lord may all my hard times be healing times
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
quote:
Schroedinger's cat: Most drone is arrythmical.
True, but it has a very specific audience. I have played forms of free jazz that have as little patterns as possible (away with melodies! chords! rhythm!), most often for an audience of three.
The reason why these musical styles draw a small, very specific audience is because they aren't easy to listen to. You have to step over your need for patterns in a way.
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Arabella Purity Winterbottom
Trumpeting hope
# 3434
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Posted
Oddly enough, Makepiece, your opening post sounds like my first ever composition assignment at university (doing a BMus). We had to listen to the environment around us and write it down as music. We were expected to make up our own notation system for the assignment.
I thought I'd be very clever and chose 6am on a Sunday morning, thinking it would be quiet. I ended up scoring a police chase, a car crashing into a lamp post, lots of screaming and the sound of sirens coming from every direction.
It was an assignment that really made me think about what music is, how I listen to sound, and the meaning of sounds in the world. As a result, I've tended to regard most sound as having interest in its own right. I love music, and I'm thoroughly trained to postgraduate level in it, but I still like listening to ordinary sounds and working out meaning and intent, rhythm and sound patterns. They're not the same, but I find both valuable.
I'm also reminded of some of my clients with auditory sensory processing issues who hear every sound as equal - for them, music cuts down on the confusion because it is (mostly) predictable.
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bib
Shipmate
# 13074
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Posted
Mind you, it depends what some people call music. Some so called music is more irritating than any other sound such as a dog barking in the night. I find rap so called music particularly irritating and likely make me run for cover. And yet there are some souls who actually enjoy such boring drivel.
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Twilight
Puddleglum's sister
# 2832
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Posted
If it's all about pattern and organization why do we love some music and hate other music which seems just as well organized?
Where does the snob factor come in where we hear someone say they love Bach but Chopin is just sentimental drivel?
I'm not very musical. My radio is permanently set to NPR and I sort of dread the Christmas church services that are all music, no sermon. The organized sounds I like to listen to are plays and documentaries. Yet I'm not completely lost to it all, I love to dance to music and I'm occasionally very moved by certain pieces, just not as often as most people. What does that say about my brain, I wonder?
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Twilight:
If it's all about pattern and organization why do we love some music and hate other music which seems just as well organized?
Personal preference and the variation of individuals within a group does not change or negate general observations of the characteristics of that group.
What we like or hate is influenced by our individual differences, the culture(s) we are exposed to and our social interactions.
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Twilight:
If it's all about pattern and organization why do we love some music and hate other music which seems just as well organized?
I think there is something about the human aspect of the organisation. There is something of the creators of the music that we listen to, something of their emotions and feelings. If we chime with them, we will probably enjoy the music more than if we don't.
I suppose it is a bit like organising your CDs - they can be organised into colour, alphabetically, by date of recording or of purchase (and probably a few other variants too). Whichever, they are all organised, but there is probably one that you find most natural.
In my case, it is the chaotic disorganisation, which says something too.
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Lord may all my hard times be healing times
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Makepiece
Shipmate
# 10454
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by Makepiece:
What is it in the laying down of pattern and deviation that does produce affect?
It's just the way our brains are wired. As mousethief said, we are wired to notice patterns. We are also wired to notice change and variation - our brains work by noticing changes in our environment and filtering out unchanging stuff on the grounds that it probably isn't important.
Ok, so why are our brains wired that way? Is it merely fortuitous or is there some other connection? For example if I expect to see my child when I return home from work each day then one day when they leave home I will feel their absence. Consciously I will not expect to see my child but unconsciously I will feel the absence. I may not even know what to attribute the feeling to if it is unconscious. Is it the case that the changes that occur in music provoke unconscious feelings that actually can be connected back to some experience in our lives? Lets say I hear a soft, high pitched ascending motive. Lets pretend that we know it provokes an unconscious memory of hearing my mother's soft voice as a baby and that this makes me feel happy. Lets say that the composition departs from this motive by pausing and then descending and lets pretend that we know this makes me unconsciously mourn for the absence of my mothers soft voice and thus that I experience a sense of yearning. The composition then returns to the original motive, this time with a satisfying cadence and I feel at peace by the end because as we know (or pretend to know), but as the listener under the veil of ignorance cannot 'know',the conclusion brings me back to my first love.
In other words is our experience of music limited to the range of emotions that we have in fact already experienced or does it have the power to also provoke emotions that transcend our finite experiences?
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Makepiece:
Ok, so why are our brains wired that way? Is it merely fortuitous or is there some other connection?
In terms of recognising change, there are plenty of evolutionary and other theories about how that's good for survival and more efficient than noticing everything equally. And I would expect that recognising patterns is useful as well. The natural world does have patterns, it's not solely the province of human beings.
Beyond that I'm not going to try to go. You could apply the same sorts of questions to the visual arts - why do we like certain proportions, etc etc. Eventually you're going to reach a point of pretty abstract theory that comes back to saying "we like what we like and people have been shaping the arts based on what 'works' for thousands and thousands of years".
I did see a documentary some years ago that tried to investigate music at a rather basic, cellular level, relating it to things like brain waves and heartbeat rhythms, but I'm afraid I can't remember the name of the documentary. I remember finding some of it plausible and some of it a bit speculative.
At the end of the day, music is still more of an art than a science, and to me that means not everything about it is readily definable. There are people trying to reduce creating a hit song into a mathematical formula, but frankly I hope that listeners are never so horrifying predictable that the formula succeeds.
In Classical music, the ideal of 'sonata form' is an attempt to describe what people like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven did, rather than a template that they followed. In fact there's barely a work by those masters that strictly follows the "rules" later generations laid down from their music. Haydn made musical jokes that play on people's expectations. Nothing in a science textbook is ever going to tell you to suddenly get loud on the last note of the 'boring' tune.
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balaam
Making an ass of myself
# 4543
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Posted
Background sounds are music. A point that has made by several composers, from the orchestra mimicking birdsong in Beethoven's 6th symphony, to the silence of John Cage's 4' 33", Stockhausen's silent cadenza in Trans or the silent track on John Lennon's Mind Games album.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
Beethoven's birdsong is not "background", though. And I wouldn't trust either Cage or Stockhausen as far as I could throw them.
A silent track is silence. Right now I can hear myself typing onmy keyboard while I listen to music. That doesn't mean the typing sounds are a part of the music, and if the CD I was listening to had a passage of silence the typing sounds would not become part of the music by virtue of the coincidence that they happened to fill the emptiness.
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Porridge
Shipmate
# 15405
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Posted
I keep imagining a baby in the womb. It's in a living sensory deprivation chamber, except for sound: it hears the mother's body sounds; it can hear (or so I've read) both speech and musical cadences from the environment around the mother, as well as some aspects of the mother's own productions of speech or melody. It seems likely we form some sort of emotional attachment to these experiences, as we meet up with them from a position of almost-complete security.
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Komensky
Shipmate
# 8675
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Posted
We need a little philosophical nuancing here about the difference between organised sound and music. True, music is usually some kind of organised sound, but not all organised sound is music. When my phone rings, for example, it is organised sound, but (in the case of my phone) not music. Why not? Because it is not perceived as music. I don't marvel at the tone or the predictability of the rhythmic organisation, I go and answer it (or, more likely, ignore it). One could create a scenario whereby otherwise non-musical examples of organised sound are presented in a way to be perceived as music (which is now old hat, really).
Merely saying something is music isn't really enough, it must be perceived as music. This is how the great composers have been able to change and expand our notions of what constitutes a coherent musical vocabulary. Schumann proclaimed that Chopin's B flat minor Sonata was 'not music', but now someone with a pretty basic grasp of harmony recognises it instantly as such.
K.
[ 10. December 2014, 09:22: Message edited by: Komensky ]
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Fr Weber
Shipmate
# 13472
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Posted
Music is any sound which is intended as, or perceived as, music. This definition, by necessity, includes a lot of stuff which is going to be perceived as crap. That doesn't mean it's not music.
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Makepiece
Shipmate
# 10454
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
At the end of the day, music is still more of an art than a science, and to me that means not everything about it is readily definable. There are people trying to reduce creating a hit song into a mathematical formula, but frankly I hope that listeners are never so horrifying predictable that the formula succeeds.
If listeners are never so predictable that a formula could succeed that would suggest something significant about people. I agree that there are so many potential causes and contingencies that it would be almost impossible to pin down music precisely. However, does this not also apply to any branch of the social sciences? Attachment theory and personality profiles claim to be able to pin people down and there is perhaps a broader range of potential contingencies with regards to human behaviour as there is with responses to music. Either we must assume that psychology can give us very little useful insight about ourselves or, if we disagree with that, we must assume that we can also ascertain how and when people will respond to music in particular ways.
[fixed amalgamation of code tags and deleted duplicate post]
[ 13. December 2014, 06:55: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Fr Weber:
Music is any sound which is intended as, or perceived as, music. This definition, by necessity, includes a lot of stuff which is going to be perceived as crap. That doesn't mean it's not music.
I think you're on to something here, but I'd amend it thus:
1. Music is something created by humans or other animals for the sake of making sounds agreeable to listen to. (I intend this not so much as a definition but a description.)
I almost said pleasant but not all metal (or perhaps punk) bands are interested in pleasant.
Also I almost said "that they think other people might want to listen to" but then that excludes singing in the shower or humming to oneself.
But at any rate I'd emphasize the "intended as" and eliminate the "perceived as." I might perceive the sound of wind in trees as music, but as it's not intentional, it's not music, however pleasant I may find it.
2. I think what you're saying with your "some people" thing, correct me if I'm wrong, is something like CS Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism as applied to music: If there's one person who really loves it as music, then it doesn't matter how many other people think it's crap; it's music.
At the extreme end this can fall into a sort of aesthetic solipsism: what if the only person in the world who thinks it's music is the composer? Is it possible s/he is mistaken, or self-deluded? I think at this point I'd buck ol' Clive and say yes. And of course the composer could secretly know it's crap, and be trying to pull one over on us all. I think Philip Glass must be doing that with some of his pieces. John Cage certainly was.
[ 13. December 2014, 16:30: Message edited by: mousethief ]
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Dave W.
Shipmate
# 8765
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
And of course the composer could secretly know it's crap, and be trying to pull one over on us all. I think Philip Glass must be doing that with some of his pieces. John Cage certainly was.
I'm surprised to see Philip Glass called out for this, but maybe I'm just not sufficiently familiar with his work.
Would you (or any other Glass detractor) care to offer an example of what you would consider a particularly un-musical piece? (I'd be especially interested in anything that could be mistaken for "roof repair" as was suggested previously.)
Posts: 2059 | From: the hub of the solar system | Registered: Nov 2004
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Really it was hyperbole. Mostly his stuff is too boring to be upset about.
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Rossweisse
High Church Valkyrie
# 2349
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Because the human brain is wired to find, recognize, analyze, and appreciate PATTERN. It's why we see faces in the embers, or in photographs of Mars. We are the pattern-seekers.
Well, that's some of it. But music speaks to us in ways that go beyond that. One of those ways is in our perceptions of beauty.
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I'm not dead yet.
Posts: 15117 | From: Valhalla | Registered: Feb 2002
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Rossweisse
High Church Valkyrie
# 2349
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Posted
I am not a particular fan of Mr. Glass's oeuvre, but I can think of far more egregious composers who might be called out. (Paging Karlheinz Stockhausen...)
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
I saw the opera by Philip Glass The Fall of the House of Usher when it was performed at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
My companion for the opera insisted on splitting a bottle of wine with dinner before the show. It worked well, I'd drowse off on the third repetition of some phrase and wake up some number of repetitions later in time for the transition. But without chemical help it does seem protracted.
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Rossweisse
High Church Valkyrie
# 2349
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Posted
I have actually performed Mr. Glass's music, in his opera "Satyahooha," and it was terrifying at times. I will say that I have never been in anything where the entire cast and orchestra were always locked in on the conductor, for fear of missing a cutoff.
(My favorite story came from the late conductor Christopher Keene, who told me about doing "Akhnaten" at the late New York City Opera. He got lost in the repetitions one night, and turned to the pianist at his elbow frantically playing arpeggios. "Do you know where we are?" he asked her, sotto voce. "I was hoping you knew," she replied. They cut it off together, and, miraculously, everyone else cut it off with them. That's a problem with Glass...)
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Posts: 15117 | From: Valhalla | Registered: Feb 2002
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Does anybody like twelve-tone rows? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
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Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Rossweisse
High Church Valkyrie
# 2349
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Posted
I regard 12-tone rows as a tool to depict certain things, things like insanity, imminent death, gross torture, and the like.
Do I like them? No, they're just a useful tool. I don't listen to them for enjoyment, certainly.
Serialism may be seen as a way to allow wannabe composers with no gift for melody to make a living. (YMMV.)
[ 14. December 2014, 02:37: Message edited by: Rossweisse ]
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Posts: 15117 | From: Valhalla | Registered: Feb 2002
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
I found a random twelve-tone row generator online. I can be a composer without even trying!
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Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Does anybody like twelve-tone rows? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
In small doses and in context, yes. They rob the music of a tonal centre, which can give a sense of drifting or lack of order.
If that's ALL you've got then I'm not sure it's that interesting. But Shostakovich's 12th string quartet does a rather excellent job of gradually moving from a sense of disorder to a triumphant, strongly tonal conclusion. It's one of my favourites of his string quartets.
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Posts: 18173 | From: Under | Registered: Jul 2008
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Komensky
Shipmate
# 8675
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Posted
Some very good points in this thread. Some of the issues raised are drifting toward music and psychology; less what about 'what is good' and more about 'why do people react certain ways to certain sounds?'. I just heard an interesting lecture at a research series (that I just happen to run) by someone from Oxford who presented a rather unusual experiment. They took a sample of 60 people from the streets of Oxford and played each of them either 5 minutes of (sub-Saharan) African pop music or 5 minutes of Indian 'pop' music. The idea was that the music could be, at least superficially, associated with those places, but still couched in a familiar framework for the listener. After that they ran a reactions test whereby each participant saw a face that was either African or Indian looking and accompanied by either positive or negative words. The result was that people who first heard 5 minutes of Indian music were more likely to associate the Indian faces with positive words or expressions and those who heard the African music were more likely to react positively to the African faces. There are bigger questions about how long this (apparent) effect lasts, but it's certainly enough to warrant further exploration. Music can change us.
K.
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"The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity." - George Bernard Shaw
Posts: 1784 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2004
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Figbash
The Doubtful Guest
# 9048
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Posted
Rossweise wrote:
quote:
I regard 12-tone rows as a tool to depict certain things, things like insanity, imminent death, gross torture, and the like.
Do I like them? No, they're just a useful tool. I don't listen to them for enjoyment, certainly.
Serialism may be seen as a way to allow wannabe composers with no gift for melody to make a living. (YMMV.)
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif) Oh dear, oh dear. Schoenberg, Berg, Britten, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Tippett, Henze, Walton, Copland are all 'wannabe composers with no gift for melody' are they? What a strange and limited conception of music, which is (thank heavens) about rather more than tunes.
I assume, by the way, that you are aware that, after writing 'Porgy and Bess' Gershwin decided that he had done all he could with tonality, and asked his great friend Schoenberg to give him tuition in dodecaphonic composition, which he saw as his only way forward. It is a rather great shame, I think, that his death prevented us from seeing what he might have become.
The irony of this is that some serial music, particularly Darmstadt style total serialism, is extremely rigorously organised, indeed, organised rather to excess. I would suggest that this makes a mockery of the claim that organisation is all.
Because, when push comes to shove, music is merely noise that somebody happens to enjoy hearing sufficiently to remark on the fact.
Posts: 1209 | From: Gashlycrumb | Registered: Feb 2005
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Fr Weber
Shipmate
# 13472
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Figbash:
Schoenberg, Berg, Britten, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Tippett, Henze, Walton, Copland are all 'wannabe composers with no gift for melody' are they?
You forgot Webern! But perhaps that was on purpose... ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
Kidding, mostly. But I agree with you about the Darmstadt school, which bores me stiff. About the composers you quote, I range from polite interest to great enthusiasm, with the greatest enthusiasm reserved for those who used their personal aesthetic judgment as to how the rows and series should be tweaked for the best musical outcome. For me, result always trumps process.
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"The Eucharist is not a play, and you're not Jesus."
--Sr Theresa Koernke, IHM
Posts: 2512 | From: Oakland, CA | Registered: Feb 2008
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