faile
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response 25 of 27:
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Oct 26 06:26 UTC 1998 |
Incidentally, the riot that happened at the "Rite of Spring" premire was
not because of the music; critical reaction to the music was the most
favorable reaction to that performance... the riot was due to the dance,
which portrayed ritual murder and rape. The audience didn't like that
at all.
I really like "modernist" music... I'm of the opinion that traditional
harmony really hit it's peak with Mahler, Scriaban, and Wagner. They
took teh tonal languge as far as it could go. So the next generation of
composers was left to discover a new harmonic languge. There were any
number of answers to that ranging from the very "listenable" Debussy to
the free atonality, and later serialism of Schoenberg. Maybe because
I've studied most of these techniques, I can really get into the music,
though this is not to say that I would want to turn it on to listen to
it as background music. For example, Charles Ives' fourth symphony (an
amazing peice, for anyone who's interested... I highly reccomend it), is
heavy... not something you listen to over dinner.
I had an interesting experience at a string quartet concert the other
night. I was seated next to an older woman, and the quartet played a
peice of Anton Webern's, which had several movements which used
serialism, and the rest used free atonality. After the peice, which was
right before intermission, she asked me, "As a girl of the 90's, do you
really like that kind of music?" We got to talking about it, and she's
been trying to understand it, but, she just can't get her ears used to
it. My question then is, do we like tonality becuase our ears are used
to it?
As far as "listenable" composers I might reccomend some of Ives' easier
to handle works (even the 4th Symphony, for the adventurous), like the
first string quartet, some of his songs (like "The Children's Hour", or
"The Things Our Fathers Loved," or "The Cage."), The Unanswered
Question, The Holidays Symphony, maybe the first Symphony. (But if you
want to avoid atonality, I would tell you to stay away from teh piano
music... particularly the "Concord Sonata.") The nice thing about Ives
is that he usually gives a program to go with his dissonances, where
they happen, and he quotes a lot of hymn tunes. Somebody else I might
reccomend is little known composer Michael Kurek (he's the head of the
theory dpt. here)... he's got a CD out, and I think his first string
quartet is on a Blair String Quartet CD.
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md
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response 26 of 27:
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Oct 26 11:58 UTC 1998 |
Thanks for the recommendation. I haven't heard of Michael Kurek.
I'm always eager to listen to new music that others give high marks
to.
Stravinsky himself once remarked that the riot at the premiere of
Le sacre was at least partly due to the spectacle of all those
"pigtailed Lolitas" prancing around the stage. But the current line,
that the music had nothing to do with the riot, is simply wrong. The
music had everything to do with it.
In answer to your question about tonality, I believe it's possible
for one's ears to get used to just about anything. I love Eliot
Carter's music, for example. But when some nice person asks me how
I can listen to that horrible stuff, I feel as if I'm saying, "Sure,
it all feels like someone pounding a nail into your head; but there's
clumsy nail-pounding and there's artful nail-pounding, like Carter's
Concerto for Orchestra." In other words, we can get used to anything.
What I've been wondering lately is if we're on the wrong track.
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orinoco
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response 27 of 27:
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Nov 14 03:29 UTC 1998 |
I think the difficulty people have understanding music from other cultures
shows that yes, we do mostly like what we're used to. I tend to have pretty
adventurous taste in music, but there are some sorts of foreign music that
I can't make any sense of, and I doubt this is because they're "Bad
Music" - they're just not what I'm used to. On the other hand, I've made
myself get used to some kinds of music that I used to not understand, and once
I knew the music well enough to pick up on what was going on I liked it a lot.
What I don't really like, though, is the argument that "if you try, you can
get used to it" as a justification for intentionally difficult music. So I
guess I'm with you in the "are we on the wrong track or what?" camp.
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